With the help of lab experiments we study the impact of discharging insolvent debtors of their residual debt. We investigate the impact of different participation rules and the impact of different types of lenders. We find that higher participation rates encourage risk taking behaviour of...

While many commentators perceive unemployment to be a key risk factor for intimate partner violence, the empirical evidence remains limited. We combine individual-level data from the British Crime Survey (BCS) with local labor market data to estimate the effects of total and gender-specific...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a non-cooperative model of a couple's time allocation between market work and providing a household public good. We find that the optimal structure of differential taxation by gender is solely determined by spouses' relative...

Germany has the lowest birth rate among all OECD countries. To encourage fertility, the federal government has recently introduced a set of reforms that led to a substantial expansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrative county-level data, we exploit...

In Germany, it has become conventional wisdom that the economic uncertainty associated fixed-term employment contracts prevents young couples from realizing their desire to have children. From a research perspective, it is however far from clear whether fixed-term contracts are the obstacle to...